OBSERVATIONS ON THE FILM JOHN RABE
Moteki Hiromichi
Secretary General, Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact
The German-French-Chinese film John Rabe, directed by Florian Gallenberger, made its
debut in Germany on April 2, 2009. The first showing of the film in China took place onApril 28. The production budget for the film must have been huge. However, anyone whoperceives John Rabe as a non-fiction film, or a re-enactment of events that transpired inNanking in late 1937, is operating under a grave misconception. The many problems thatplague the film are exemplified by subtitles that appear at the end of the film: “Three hundred
thousand Chinese were massacred. Even today, right-wing elements in Japan refuse torecognize this fact.”
I shall provide a detailed explanation later in this essay, but for the time being, suffice it to
say that John Rabe does not mention having witnessed even one murder in any of his journal
1entries (published as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe ). How do we
explain an extrapolation from zero to 300,000? This figure reflects the prejudices of thefilm’s creators. No film based on fact could have arrived at such a conclusion. John Rabefilm is not non-fiction, nor is it even historical fiction. It is — pure and simple — apropaganda film.

Why Rabe headed the International Committee
As Japanese forces neared Nanking in November 1937, 15 resident foreigners from Westernnations (seven Americans, four Britons, three Germans and one Dane) formed theInternational Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (hereafter referred to as “InternationalCommittee”); the members selected John Rabe as chairman. The committee agreed toestablish a neutral safety zone within the Nanking city limits, which would accommodate thecity’s civilian population and protect it from the ravages of war. The zone was 3.86 square
kilometers in area, approximately the size of New York City’s Central Park. Its boundaries
were marked, but there were no fences.
The International Committee asked the Japanese military to formally recognize the Safety
Zone as neutral territory. The Japanese responded that they would make every effort torespect the Safety Zone, but declined to grant the request officially because the zone hadneither walls nor barriers that would prevent Chinese troops from infiltrating it.
And in fact, when the Japanese occupied Nanking, a huge number of Chinese troops
discarded their uniforms and took refuge in the Safety Zone. The Japanese found huge cachesof their weapons and ammunition there, and discovered anti-aircraft gun emplacements andother military installations, all of which compromised the zone’s neutrality.

1John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed. Erwin Wickert, trans. John E.
Woods (New York: Knopf, 1998).

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In any case, the 200,000 civilians remaining in Nanking had assembled in a rather small
space — the Safety Zone. On December 8, 1937, Tang Shengzhi, commander of theNanking Defense Force, issued an order instructing all noncombatants to gather in the Safety
Zone, which was under the control of the International Committee. Without a special pass, it
was impossible to leave the Safety Zone. International Committee members took
responsibility for the city’s 200,000 remaining residents when Nanking’s mayor, Ma Chaojun,
fled the city (having handed over food and other supplies to the committee). To understandthe situation at the time, it is important to know why Rabe, a German, was selected as thecommittee’s chairman, since most of the members were American or British.

Chiang’s German military advisors
Many people assume that John Rabe was chosen to head the International Committee because
Japan and Germany were both party to the Tripartite Pact. However, this was not the case.
Japan and Germany had concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, which Italy
later signed. But that agreement must not be confused with the Tripartite Pact, which dates
from September 1939. The Anti-Comintern Pact was, as its name implies, directed against
Comintern activities. The Germans were lobbying the Chinese to join as well. We know thatJapanese national policy was not restricted by that agreement because on December 6, 1938,
the Japanese government adopted an official Action Plan Concerning Jews, which statesclearly that Japan would not discriminate against members of the Jewish faith.
However, Germany had made binding commitments to China. In 1928, a team of German
military advisors was dispatched to China. In 1934, Gen. Hans von Seeckt, former chief of
the German General Staff, was appointed the fourth head of that team. His priority was themodernization of the Chinese military. Von Seeckt was succeeded by Gen. Alexander vonFalkenhausen, who was determined to form 60 modernized Chinese divisions. He advised theChinese to erect pillboxes in the Shanghai area. Von Falkenhausen’s primary goal waspreparing Chinese forces for war with Japan. On October 1, 1936, he counseled ChiangKai-shek to attack the Japanese in Hankou and Shanghai. This was 10 months before regular
Chinese troops launched a full-scale offensive in Shanghai. In the spring of 1937, vonFalkenhausen again urged Chiang to attack the Japanese in Shanghai.
The German advisory team did not stop at guiding the Chinese toward military modernization.
They exhorted the Chinese to purchase German weapons, as well as products of the German
chemical and heavy industries. Such encouragement also involved the Federation of German
Industry, and even a campaign to promote the development of the chemical and heavy
industries in China with German support. China was on the verge of becoming Germany’s
best customer. Siemens, the leading German electrical engineering firm, actively solicited
Chinese business. Rabe, who had been in China for quite a few years and who headed
Siemens’ Nanking operation, was chosen as chairman of the International Committee
because of his close military and economic connections with the Chiang administration.

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What happened in the Safety Zone?
On December 13, 1937, Nanking fell; on that day, some Japanese units entered the city. The
soldiers were bewildered to find themselves surrounded by silence. The defending Chinese
forces had retreated, and there were no civilians to be seen. The Japanese soon discoveredthat all civilian residents of Nanking had assembled in one section of the city (the SafetyZone). Accordingly, accusations made at the Tokyo Trials to the effect that Japanese military
personnel stormed into Nanking, killed everyone in sight, and left mountains of corpses andoceans of blood in their wake, are utterly ludicrous.
On December 14, the International Committee submitted a letter signed by Rabe andaddressed to “the Japanese Commander of Nanking.” The letter commences as follows: “Wecome to thank you for the fine way your artillery spared the Safety Zone and to establish
2contact with you for future plans for care of Chinese civilians in the Zone.”
What happened in the Safety Zone later on in the month? Did Japanese soldiers go on akilling spree there?
The International Committee made a variety of requests of Japanese military authorities.
They also submitted typed reports in English of unlawful acts allegedly committed byJapanese military personnel, on practically a daily basis. Copies of those letters and reports
issued by the International Committee over a two-month period were compiled and publishedin 1939 under the title Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone. The publishing house was
Kelly & Walsh, a Shanghai firm. The compiler and editor was Hsü Shuhsi, an advisor to theForeign Ministry, whose work was supervised by the Council of International Affairs inChunking (Chongqing), then the seat of the Chinese government. Therefore, we may assume
that the government believed that publishing the documents would work to its advantage. Orconversely, that doing so would work against Japan’s interests, as the book showed theJapanese in a bad light.
Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone contains accounts of 517 alleged unlawful acts.
However, it is difficult to imagine that the 107 crimes supposedly committed at night werethe work of Japanese soldiers. It was pitch dark at night in a Nanking without electricity.
According to a Chinese officer who infiltrated the Safety Zone, “the barbarian soldiers [theJapanese] were too fearful to venture into the city at night, either inside or outside the Safety
3Zone. (...) That was the time when we (the refugees) could do whatever we wanted.” Guo
was right: Japanese military personnel would not have exposed themselves to such danger.
Furthermore, the case reports are rife with hearsay and rumors. For instance, only 30 out of517 reports (less than 10%) state that the crime in question was witnessed. Twenty-six of thecases involve murders, but only one of the reports mentions a witness. However, theInternational Committee acknowledged that that case (which involved a Chinese soldier
2Hsü Shuhsi, ed., Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1939), p. 1.

3

Guo Qi, Lamenting the Fall of Our Capital, reprinted as The Nanking Massacre (Taipei: Zhongwai
Tushu Chubanshe, 1978).

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whom the Japanese discovered hiding in the Safety Zone) was a lawful execution. Not one
report describes a witnessed murder. There was no killing spree. Two hundred thousand souls
were crowded into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park, meaning that there were200,000 potential witnesses, but Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone mentions no4witnessed, unlawful killings.

Nanking’s population increases by 50,000
What does Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone have to say about demographics? When it
became clear that the Japanese would attack Nanking, the city’s residents began to leave. The
government announced that it would be withdrawing from Nanking; Mayor Ma Chaojun
departed on December 3. The population of Nanking, once one million, had shrunk to
200,000 by the beginning of December 1937, according to statistics released by Wang Gupan,head of the National Police Agency. The International Committee based its activities(procurement of food, etc.) on that figure.
According to Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, the population remained 200,000 for
the entire month of December (reports are dated December 17, 18, 21 and 27). By January 14,5
1938, it had risen to 250,000, where it remained for some time.
The members of the International Committee noticed absolutely no decline in the number ofpeople living in the Safety Zone. Since those were turbulent times, the 200,000 figure citedby Wang Gupan was not precise, but was the best estimate possible under the circumstances.
The International Committee obviously agreed with that estimate, and did not detect any
major change in the population throughout December. Some people may speculate that there
were people living outside the Safety Zone, but if there were, they were rare exceptions andvery few in number. Document No. 9 (a letter from the International Committee to theJapanese Embassy dated December 17), which states that “on the 13th, when your troops
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entered the city, we had nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone,” is ample
proof. It also jibes with the testimony of Japanese military personnel who were in Nanking atthe time. (Incidentally, in The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang invents 300,000 -400,000 Chinese
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living outside the Safety Zone, all of whom were massacred. Others set the number ofvictims at 50,000 or 100,000; the actual population being what it was, massacre victims
would have had to be invented, regardless of their number.
When January arrived, there was an upward revision of the population estimate, for thefollowing two reasons. First, at the end of 1937, the Japanese had conducted a census, issuing4

For a detailed analysis of Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, see Tomisawa Shigenobu, “UsingPrimary Sources to Clarify the Nanking Incident” at http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/57_S4.pdf.
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Hsü, op. cit., pp. 17, 18, 48, 57, 84.
Ibid., pp. 14-15.

7Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York : PenguinBooks, 1998), pp. 81, 100.

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civilian passports to every person they counted; they recorded 160,000 persons. TheCommittee estimated that the population was 250,000 if children under 10 and elderly
women, who had not been counted, were included. Second, civilians who had fled Nanking
to avoid the hostilities began returning to the city, proof that it was safe again. No one would
have been so foolish as to go anywhere near the scene of a massacre.

The lies of an anti-Japanese Nazi
How do Rabe’s diary entries for December 1937 and January 1938 compare with the contentof Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, which cover that two-month period?
First of all, Rabe reports seeing the dead bodies of many noncombatants during a tour of8
Nanking on December 13, after the city fell. However, the streets of Nanking could not havebeen strewn with such corpses for the very reason that civilian residents of Nanking hadtaken refuge in the Safety Zone. If there were bodies in the streets, they must have been thoseof fallen soldiers, but Rabe implies that they were murder victims for whose deaths theJapanese were responsible. However, he stops short of claiming that he personally witnessed
the murders of any civilians.
But he does make outrageous claims in a report addressed to Adolf Hitler:
1. Suspected of once having been soldiers, thousands of individuals were killed with machineguns or hand grenades.
2. Gasoline was poured over civilians, who were then burned alive.
And despite the fact that Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone states that the population had
increased, and Rabe himself had not witnessed even one murder in the jam-packed Safety
Zone, he states in his report to Hitler that “Chinese sources report that the Japanese murdered
100,000 civilians, but we foreigners believe that 50,000 or 60,000 are more accurate
estimates.” It would be difficult to find a bigger liar.
As the head of the International Committee, Rabe was responsible for administering what hepresented as a neutral zone. That notwithstanding, he hid two Chinese colonels named Long
9and Zhou there. He also describes giving shelter to an air force officer named Wang Hanman
10in the Safety Zone. Such actions were obviously a complete betrayal of the neutrality
claim.
This was the real Rabe, the man who is now hailed as a humanitarian, as the “Schindler ofNanking.” Rabe’s actual behavior stands to reason, because he traveled in the same circles as
von Falkenhausen, who we know was pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese because he urged
Chiang Kai-shek to regard the Japanese as China’s main enemy, and to launch a preemptive
8Rabe, op. cit., p. 67.

910Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., pp. 201-202.

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attack against them. Rabe also appears to have had a misplaced superiority complex withrespect to the Japanese, as indicated by one entry, which reads, “Usually all I have to do is11
shout ‘Deutsch’ and ‘Hitler’ and they turn polite ... .” Japanese military personnel would
not have understood German, and they were not nearly as intimidated by Germans as Rabe,
with his jaundiced view of the Japanese, would have us believe.
As stated earlier, Japan was party to the Anti-Comintern Pact, but its nondiscrimination
policy regarding Jews was adopted at the Five-Minister Conference held in Tokyo onDecember 6, 1938. Because that policy was in place, Sugihara Chiune was able to issue visas
that saved the lives of 5,000 Jews. Similarly, Maj.-Gen. Higuchi Kiichiro of the Harbin
Special Agency succeeded in helping a great many Jewish refugees enter Manzhouguo frombordering Otpor. Higuchi also supported a congress of Jewish communities in the Far East
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held in Harbin.

Stop perverting history!
As stated previously, the Germans allied themselves with the Chinese in the 1930s against
the Japanese. It would seem that they are repeating history today. This time, burdened withthe guilt of Nazi crimes, the Germans are attempting to lighten their consciences byconvincing the international community that the Japanese committed worse war crimes thanthey did. Perhaps that was the true motive behind the production of the propaganda film John
Rabe, and its claims regarding 300,000 massacre victims in Nanking.
However, this will prove to be a futile attempt. Based as it is on Rabe’s diaries and reports(both of which are rife with spurious accounts), and on blatant prejudice, the film has nodistinction other than as propaganda conveying a distorted image of Japanese militarypersonnel. Its worst offense is the “300,000-victim massacre” accusation, that in the face ofevidence in Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone to the effect that the population of
Nanking actually increased during the Japanese occupation.
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the allegation (at the end of the film) thatJapanese right-wing elements refuse to accept the 300,000-victim-massacre charge ashistorical fact. The inclusion of “right-wing elements” is a tired old ploy used with theknowledge that it will trigger knee-jerk hostility. I urge that this portion of the text be
replaced with “Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone in no way supports the300,000-victim-massacre charge.”
It was the Japanese (unlike the Germans, who massacred millions of Jews) who adopted anational policy of nondiscrimination against members of the Jewish faith, and who rescued agreat many of them from certain extermination. Accusing the Japanese of crimes worse thanthose perpetrated by the Nazis is revisionist history of the worst kind!

11Rabe, op. cit., p. 79.

12For further information, see Uesugi Chitose, Japan that Helped the Jewish Refugees,
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/25_S2.pdf.

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In today’s world it should not be possible to fabricate history, and the notion that enemies of
the truth would attempt to do so is unbearably painful and absolutely untenable. There are
only two options open to them, however. They can hold book-burnings (a method favored byboth the Nazis and the Communist Chinese) to suppress the evidence in Documents of theSafety Zone. Or they can heed the advice proffered in an old saying attributed to propagandist
Joseph Goebbels: “A lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth.”7